A complete free toolkit for crawling, indexing, performance, backlinks and structured data. Every tool below has a genuinely useful free tier — no credit card, no trial countdown. Where a tool has hard free limits, they are listed honestly.
Best for: what Google actually thinks of your site.
Index coverage (which URLs are indexed and why others are not), search queries and clicks, Core Web Vitals field data, manual actions, and the public URL Inspection tool. If you use one tool on this list, use this one.
Free limits: none for verification owners · requires a Google account and DNS/file verification.
Best for: Core Web Vitals and performance scores.
Mobile and desktop scores for performance, SEO, accessibility and best practices, with lab data (LCP, CLS, TBT, FCP) and real-world field data from the Chrome UX Report. Runs on Google's free public API — no key needed.
Free limits: rate-limited public API · perfect for spot checks.
Best for: seeing your site through 16 crawler user agents.
Submit a URL and it is fetched as a normal browser and then as Googlebot, Bingbot, YandexBot, Baiduspider and 12 more — showing real HTTP status, response time, blocking and content differences per bot. The fastest way to answer "can Googlebot actually reach this page?"
Free limits: free and open · unlimited submits · include the checker for on-page audits.
Best for: what visitors do after they arrive.
Search Console tells you impressions and clicks; GA4 tells you engagement time, scroll depth, conversions and landing-page performance. Together they close the loop between rankings and revenue.
Free limits: standard free tier covers most sites · data sampled in very large properties.
Best for: Bing, DuckDuckGo and Copilot visibility.
Bing powers search for Bing, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT search and Windows Copilot. WMT offers site scans, index reports, keyword research, backlink data and a URL submission tool — fully free after verification.
Free limits: free · verification via DNS, XML file or meta tag.
Best for: free backlinks and technical audits.
Verify your site and get a real crawl: broken links, redirect chains, missing metadata, plus your backlink profile and internal-link opportunities. The free tier is Ahrefs' own crawler on your verified domains.
Free limits: verified sites only · limited crawl depth on large sites.
Best for: structured data that actually qualifies.
Paste a URL or code snippet and see which rich results your markup can produce — FAQ, HowTo, Product, Breadcrumbs, Article and more — with exact errors and warnings. Structured data is how you earn stars, FAQs and sitelinks in the SERP.
Free limits: unlimited tests · Google decides final eligibility.
Best for: a full desktop crawl of a small site.
Crawls up to 500 URLs for free and reports status codes, titles, meta descriptions, canonicals, hreflang, redirect chains, orphan pages and duplicate content. Still the quickest way to audit a brochure or blog site locally.
Free limits: 500 URLs per crawl · desktop app (Windows, macOS, Linux).
Best for: performance regression monitoring.
Lab tests from multiple regions with a full waterfall chart, plus optional scheduled monitoring and alerts on the free tier. Easier to read than raw Lighthouse when explaining performance to a client.
Free limits: daily test credits · one monitored region.
Best for: checking JSON-LD syntax by hand.
When you write schema yourself (like the WebApplication, FAQPage and BreadcrumbList markup on this site), validate against the official vocabulary to catch wrong types, missing required properties and typos before Google does.
Free limits: none · documentation and validator are open.
robots.txt).Yes, for most sites. The combination of Search Console + GA4 + one crawler covers crawling, indexing, content and analytics. Paid tiers mostly add historical data, competitor research and larger crawl limits — valuable at scale, unnecessary to start.
No. PageSpeed Insights has a keyless public API, and the Rich Results Test accepts pasted snippets. Paid API keys only matter for heavy automation.
A crawler (Googlebot) fetches your pages; an indexer decides what to store and rank. Tools like Search Console show you the outcome, while a multi-bot crawler like Fast Index Google shows you the fetch itself — status codes, redirects, blocking and content served to each bot.
Re-crawl critical URLs after every deploy that changes routing, rendering or server config. Run the full audit monthly, and check Search Console weekly for new coverage drops.